polite manners and kind words, because of this sister’s home-coming. But then Bertha came up and smiled, and found the kind word and the polite manner. She kissed her younger sister, said something charming. Mrs. van Lowe beamed. The other sisters and brothers followed, the nephews, the nieces. At last, one by one, they had all welcomed her. Constance had kissed them, or shaken hands; and she was deathly pale; and her black eyes trembled, misty with tears. Her voice broke, her hands shook, she felt a sinking at her knees. A passion of weeping was rising to her eyes; and she found it almost impossible to control herself. She kept hold of her mother’s hand, like a child, sat down by her, tried to smile and to behave normally. Her words almost choked her; her breath throttled her. Her black eyes started from their sockets, quivering, in her deathly-pale face, and she shivered as though in a fever. She tried to do her best, to talk as though she had only been away a year. But it was no use. She had not set foot in those rooms since the day, twenty years ago, when she married De Staffelaer, the Dutch envoy at Rome. . . . Since then, so much had happened in Rome, oh, so much! Her life had happened, her life of mistake upon mistake. How could she talk the usual commonplaces now? She saw herself here, twenty years ago, coming back from church, in her white bridal dress; she saw her father, now dead; she saw De Staffelaer; she saw herself, after she had changed into her travelling-dress, saying good-bye, going
